Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Towards the Shrinking of Education

Last week’s issue of the New Yorker included an
article by Andrew Marantz in “The Talk of the Town” that I found unusually
inspirational.That article also
included reference to a fact that I think is deplorably neglected and
under-explored: “… the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that in
the past few years ‘the percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food
stamps or some other aid more than doubled.’”People who are relatively familiar with my views on institutional
education will recognize this as fodder for my ire over the socially endemic
assumptions about the economic value of college education.

(If you want to get acquainted with those views,
please read this,
and this, and
this,
and this.)

Marantz went on to connect this situation to what
he says has been called the crisis in the academy, defined by the very
situation that I have been watching develop for years, in which the academic
labor market is so glutted with highly educated people that terrific scholars
are sometimes shouldered out of any sort of employment.Actually, Marantz – I think just by way of a
slightly clumsy transition – identifies the two issues with each other, as if a
need for public assistance and the absence of a high-profile academic post are
equivalent.There is a middle ground
that is being needlessly excluded, there.

Still, both issues desperately need to be
addressed in their own right, and Marantz highlights two individuals who have
taken steps to combat the lesser crisis among would-be academics.Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Abby Kluchin
recognized a demand for education among people who could not afford either the
time or the money to take the relevant courses at universities, and they
responded by teaching their disciplines in cafés over the course of several
weeks, at a cost of a few hundred dollars.

Marantz calls their business venture, the Brooklyn
Institute for Social Research, “a locavore pedagogy shop,” and I think that’s
as good a term as any for what I expect is part of a trend in education which
will increasingly challenge the large, money-driven institutions that so many
students are finding deliver little in the way of outcomes aside from a
crushing debt load.

I can still recall how excited I was years ago,
when my disdain for institutional education was still in its childhood – not its
infancy, mind you; that disdain actually predates my NYU enrollment – when I
heard a story on the news about private genetic engineering labs that people
were running in their basements.After
my graduation, I began to advocate with particular verve for the outright
rejection of the formal institutions.I
wanted, and still want, people who legitimately care about education, to show
that commitment in their private lives by educating themselves and one another
and exploring in private settings those new ideas which might be suppressed in
the academy, in favor of the status quo.

At the time that seemed like an easy thing to
accomplish with the social sciences and humanities, but the idea of moving
physical sciences out of the institution and into more intimate settings seemed
quite challenging.Seeing evidence that
not only were people up to the challenge but that they were actually doing it
thrilled me and gave me great hope for the future of smaller scale scholarly
structures.

It’s been a long time, but Marantz’s article
finally gives me hope that the trend is continuing, and that it’s embracing not
only private experimentation and scholarship, but small-scale education.With formal tertiary education demanding more
and more financial investments from students and delivering lesser and lesser
financial rewards, as well as questionable educational outcomes, I expect
people to gravitate in growing numbers towards alternative forms of both
teaching and learning.

There are others in addition to the Brooklyn
Institute, of course.The internet
provides curious individuals with many opportunities to absorb lectures for
free and in their own time through uploads of actual college courses, video
channels designed for broad-based education, TED Talks, and so on.At least one company that I know of sells
entire college courses on DVD for students to acquire at a fraction of the cost
of tuition.

I fully expect more competitors to join in this
trend, and so I expect that education in the future will look much different
than it looks under the formal structures of today.Unless the costs or the benefits of colleges
and universities dramatically shift gears, the schooling of the future will in
large part be much more local and much more collaborative.The alternatives that provide that character
have about as much knowledge to offer as the status quo, given the volume of
unemployed scholars.The only thing that
they decidedly lack is accreditation.But if degrees from accredited schools continue to deliver such dubious
prospects for employment and financial security, what value will accreditation
really have?

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About Me

I live my life in search of breaking points. It is only on the other side of them that I feel truly alive. It is only by breaking that I can build myself anew and develop as a person. I expect the same of society as a whole. Everything may come to a breaking point - a realization, a numerical, material, or emotional tipping point after which what has gone before can no longer be sustained. These are some of the breaking points I'm looking for.